Daily Archives: April 19, 2003

“I came to think that I could, with a 99 percent chance of being bang! on target and inflicting no collateral damage, spot an obvious phony. “

A “phony” being of course anyone with the insolence to decline to support the war and inform His August Presence of that fact in a public setting.

“At the meeting or the debate, someone would get up and announce that of course we’d all be better off without the “bad guy” Saddam Hussein. Having cleared his or her throat in this manner, the phony would go on to say what the real problem was (East Timor sometimes, or the imminent obliteration of tens of thousands of Baghdadi civilians, or Ariel Sharon’s plan to expel all the inhabitants of the West Bank under cover of an American imperialist war).”

Or something else entirely. Like the fact that the Iraq attack (why call it a war?) would see the deaths of countless civilians. Not that Hitchens would care. When last heard from he was trying to get across the border into Iraq, to be where the action is. Or rather was as the “war” has been semi-officially declared “over.” Save for “sporadic fighting,” of course — that will doubtless continue into a series of ethnic and religious territorial skirmishes. Hitchens could cover them, but something tells me he won’t be interested. Not when there’s an anti-war left to be castigated.

“None of these hysterical predictions came true, but now I can’t open a bulletin from the reactionary right or the anti-war left without being told that Iraq is already worse off without Saddam Hussein. And how can we tell that Iraq is worse off? Because contracts for its reconstruction are being awarded to American corporations. Of the three feasible alternatives (that the contracts go to American capitalists, or to some unspecified non-American capitalists, or that Iraqi oil production stays as it was), the supposed radicals appear to prefer the last of the three.”

“Worse off without Saddam”? How about worse off because of the attack? Worse off because food is scarce, medical supplies looted, water undrinkable and famine and disease on the rise?

Of course Saddam Hussein who, we must never forget GASSED HIS OWN PEOPLE (with the chemical weapons we gave him) doesn’t care either. And if reports are to be believed, one of his son’s chief interests is the Bush twins –whose pictures adorn the bedroom of one of his palaces. But that’s neither here nor there with a propagandist like Hitchens. After all, if we don’t agree to his ground rules we’re simply “hysterical.”

“This view, which admittedly expresses a wider concern, can stand some examination. The Iraqi oil industry was until March 2003 a fiefdom of the Baath Party. Its revenues were mysteriously apportioned but went to the upkeep of a militaristic and dictatorial regime. Its physical plant was much decayed, as a consequence of U.N. sanctions. The oil-for-food program was exploited in the most cynical manner by members and clients of the palatial Saddam regime, who used the semilegal trade to enrich themselves while starving and neglecting the population. (By the way, now that sanctions can be properly lifted, let us remember that their very imposition was opposed by the anti-war spokesmen, who would have scrapped them without conditions even though they had been imposed by the sacrosanct majority of the United Nations.)”

Oh really? Is that what would have happened? Well it’s all academic now. The U.N. is of no concern to the Rove-Wolfowitz regime. They do as they please with nought but withering disdain for “Old Europe.”

“Meanwhile, vast contracts were awarded, on the basis of political favoritism, to Russian and French consortia. At moments when the Baathist authorities felt themselves insecure, they would threaten to set fire to the oil wells or—as in late March—would actually do so.”

So the French and the Russians are just as powerful and greedy as Cheney and company only more hypocritical about admitting it? Oh yeah sure. Right.

“In front of me is a copy of the Arab Times, published in Kuwait City and picked up during my recent trip to the region. It gives a matter-of-fact account of the state of affairs in the Rumaila field, as of March 29. About 10 oil wells were ablaze, many fewer than had been feared. (A great number of bombs and charges had been laid, but either the local officers did not obey the order, or the order never came, or the fields were secured by British and American special forces too swiftly to allow the planned sabotage to occur.)”

Don’t you just love “or the order never came”? So “inside.” Hitch knows simply everyone.

“At any rate, a burning well is a tough proposition and an uncapped well—permitting a wholesale discharge—an even tougher one. The situation was being handled by Boots and Coots, a fire-control company with an almost parodically American name, which is based in Houston. Boots and Coots, which also worked in Kurdistan and Kuwait after the much worse conflagrations of 1991, is subcontracted for the task by Kellogg, Brown, and Root (another name Harold Pinter might have coined for an American oil company), which is in turn a subdivision of Halliburton.”

Correct. No “investigative reporting” skill was needed to find that out. These characters operate right in the open.

“And “Halliburton,” which admittedly sounds more British and toney than Boots and Coots, was once headed by—cue mood music of sinister corporate skyscraper as the camera pans up in the pretitle sequence—Vice President Dick Cheney. “

“British and toney”? LOL!

Of course the only reason Hitchens has risen to his position of journalistic noteriety is because he’s British and therefore percieved (by naive Americans unaware of the class system) to be “toney.” Truth to tell, Jimmy Breslin is infinitely “tonier” than Christopher Hitchens. Smarter too. But he’s not British and right-wing so he doens’t count.

“Well, if that doesn’t give away the true motive for the war, I don’t know what does. But unless the anti-war forces believe Saddam’s fires should be allowed to burn out of control indefinitely, they must presumably have an idea of which outfit should have got the contract instead of Boots and Coots. I think we can be sure that the contract would not have gone to some windmill-power concern run by Naomi Klein or the anti-Starbucks Seattle coalition, in the hope of just blowing out the flames or of extinguishing them with Buddhist mantras.”

Again the zero-sum-either/or shell game. Saddam Hussein or Naomi Klein. Halliburton or Starbucks. They’re on equal power footing, you see. But one of them is Evil. Guess which? Is this “choice” our only alternative? Isn’t a lot more involved. Not according to Hitchens.

“The number of companies able to deliver such expertise is very limited. The chief one is American and was personified for years by “Red” Adair—the movie version of his exploits (played by John Wayne himself!) was titled Hellfighters. The other main potential bidder, according to a recent letter in the London Times, is French. But would it not also be “blood for oil” to award the contract in that direction? After all, didn’t the French habitually put profits in Iraq ahead of human rights and human life? More to the point, don’t they still?”

Oh my goodness! The French are (gasp! clutch the pearls!) just as bad as we are ! More reason then to carry on doing whatever we like for whatever reason, right Hitch?

“I want to be the first to agree that transparency in the administration and allocation of oil revenues is of the highest importance. For example, there is a gigantic amount of money involved in the U.N.-administered oil-for-food program. Vast quantities of this surplus are still unspent and are backed up somewhere within a complex bureaucracy. The Kurdish people, for example, are still waiting to see how much of their hard-won cash will be released for the rebuilding of their desolated homeland. Escrow isn’t enough. All we know is that many U.N. officials are sitting contentedly on the transfers and that the great undisclosed balance is held in a French bank.”

Oh those Evil French! (It’s the “contentedly” that I love in this passage.)

“Here’s a good cause for the humanitarians to take up, if they are willing to do some work and some digging instead of mouthing a few easy slogans.”

Sorry dear but we’re busy trying to get an accurate body count of all the Iraqis we killed in order to save them from Saddam. And then there’s the problem of electricity, fresh water, medical supples and food. Little things like that.

And did we mention the looted museums filled with priceless treasures and artifacts going back to the dawn of time?

Of course to you, bringing this to light is merely the expression of “easy slogans.”

“If you are as persuaded of the materialist conception of history as, say, I am, then you owe it to yourself to study the dialectic and to avoid tautology.”

Well I’m not so I won’t. It’s not a “concept of history” that’s required at the moment. It’s food, water, electricity and medical supplies.

“A theory that seems to explain everything is just as good at explaining nothing. In Guatemala in 1954, and in Iran at about the same time, and later in Chile in 1973, it is true that the United Fruit Co., and the Anglo-Iranian oil corporation, and Pepsi, and ITT all influenced regime change too much.”

You mean when they had CIA operatives overthrow duly-elected governments, slaughter their leaders like Salvadoe Allende of Chili and put dictators like Augusto Pinochet to commit further atrocities? You call that “influence”?

“Sometimes, politics really was like a Bertolt Brecht script where the fat man in a top hat pays the bills and pulls all the strings. “

Or Pasolini’s Porcile. But one needn’t go so far afield. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American will do quite nicely.

“But in Iraq this proposed scenario is believed in only by the puerile.”

“In Iraq”? Don’t you mean “in the U.S.”? The Iraqi people are far too busy with trying to stay alive than toy with “proposed scenarios,” however Brechtian.

“It’s the baby-oil theory. It was for the sake of real oil and for the grim-faced Saudis that Saddam Hussein was kept as a favorite by Washington during the 1980s and saved from overthrow in 1991. It was not for the sake of oil that the risky decision to cease this corrupt coexistence was made.”